Product Hunt alternatives for solo founders

When people say "launch", they usually mean Product Hunt. It is the biggest name, and a good day there can change things for a product. But it is built around a single day, and that day is easiest to win if you arrive with an audience.

If you are building alone, it helps to know that there are other places, and that you do not have to choose only one. This is how I think about them.

You can launch more than once

This is the part most people miss. A launch is not a single event you get one shot at. Each site has its own visitors, its own week, and its own link back to you. Launching in five places over a month is normal, and each one is a new group of people seeing your product for the first time.

The kinds of launch sites

I am not going to rank them, because the right one depends on what you built. But they fall into a few groups, and it is worth knowing which is which. Rules and prices change, so check each site before you plan around it.

• Daily launch boards. New products every day, ranked by votes. Uneed and Fazier work this way. Good reach on your day, short shelf life.
• Boards for one kind of product. DevHunt is for developer tools. If your product fits a niche site, the people there are already your audience.
• Early access lists. BetaList is for startups that are not fully out yet. Useful before you have a finished product.
• Maker communities. Indie Hackers is a place to talk about what you are building. Less of a launch, more of a conversation, and the conversation is often worth more.
• Weekly boards. This is what ShipDesk.dev is: a small board that runs for a whole week, so a launch is not over in a day.

How to pick

Three questions help me decide where something should go first:

1. Who is on the site? A tool for developers belongs where developers look. A consumer app does not.
2. How long are you visible? A day, a week, or until the next batch pushes you down. Longer is kinder to a product nobody has heard of.
3. What stays afterwards? A page of your own and a link to your website are worth having even if the launch itself is quiet.

Where ShipDesk.dev fits

I built ShipDesk.dev for the case I kept running into myself: a finished product, no audience, and no wish to spend a week organising a launch. You paste your website, pick a day, and you are on the board for that whole week, next to a handful of other launches instead of hundreds.

It is free, your launch page stays up afterwards, and it links to your site. It is a good first launch, and it does not stop you from doing the bigger ones later, when you have something to bring to them.

If you want the longer version of why I think a week beats a day, I wrote about it in where to launch your product as a solo founder.

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